My career began at Brown University, where I received my Master's and Ph.D. degrees. After leaving Brown, I lived two years in Mexico, an experience which rekindled the excitement I had felt when living in Seville, Spain, during my junior year. I then taught for several years at Indiana University and came to Vanderbilt in 1987.

My primary area of research is Spanish American poetry. I have just completed a book on Modernism, Modernity, and the Development of Spanish American Literature. This work analyzes the Modernist movement in Spanish America and underscores its confrontation with the social, political, and philosophic alterations brought about by the arrival of modernity to Spanish America. By exploring how Modernist characteristics are related to these radical changes, the study shows Modernism's centrality to the development of modern Spanish American Literature.

Much of my previous research was also concerned with Modernism. Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity was published by the University of Texas Press and later, in an augmented version in Spanish, by Fondo de Cultura Económica. I authored the chapter on Modernist poetry which was just published in the three-volume Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. I have also published various articles on the poetry of César Vallejo and contemporary Spanish American prose fiction.